--ARGO, the Taiwan Made Satellite Raises the Curtain--

Argo is the first Taiwan made satellite totally planned and designed by the National Space Organization (NSPO). NSPO is fully accountable for the spacecraft design, development, simulation, analysis, integration, and test activities in all aspects. In order to make this full of challenge milestone evident in the history of making Taiwan own satellite, NSPO cites the ship Argo, a ship looks for the golden fleece in the Greek Mythology, as the program name for the first Taiwan made satellite. The name is chosen with the hope that the research and development team will be as brave as the brave men in the Argo ship, who took the challenge to fight for the golden fleece, which is the symbol of the country's honor and prosperity. Hopefully the team will carry the uninterrupted courage and intelligence to drive out all difficulties, and to bring the honor and achievement in the development of satellite technology to the country.

The design of the Taiwan made Argo satellite is different from the development model of the Formosat Series in the past. This satellite is completed designed by the staff of NSPO and also boldly breaks through the tradition by adapting advanced technology. The newly developed LEON-3 CPU will be implemented in the on-board computer, a core satellite component. This is the first advanced satellite in the world that uses this new LEON-3 CPU associated with all the key components and software totally developed in Taiwan for the satellite power, data and command processing, and flight control. As of today, the program has completed the system design review and steps into the next milestone of preliminary design.

Argo is scheduled to join the commercially operational RapidEye constellation owned by the RapidEye A.G., Germany, with jointly sponsored by German, British, and Canadian governments. It is expected that this constellation will be launched in 2008 into the low earth orbit with five satellites each carrying 6.5m resolution optical remote sensing instrument. This system will be capable of taking images daily on every corner of the planet earth for high value applications such as territory planning, environment monitoring, agriculture and forestry growth observation, disaster evaluation and analysis, etc. Argo will join the RapidEye project in 2009 to form a five plus one (5 + 1) constellation.

The main thrust of the Argo program is to develop Taiwan own satellite. It also joins the RapidEye project for the establishment of international cooperation and practical applications. This makes the Argo program very much worthwhile. In the future, the profit from joining the RapidEye constellation operation will increase practical gain of the Argo program. This technologically advanced satellite bus not only can be used for NSPO future satellite programs but also has full potential to step into the international market. This Argo program can be considered as the most crucial step taken in the development of Taiwan space technology.